Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox

Baker, then a Netscape lawyer, was assigned the tricky job of writing a software license for Mozilla that would permit people to alter the program without allowing them to convert the results into a proprietary product. She proved so adept at finding common ground in the often intensely conflicting needs and styles of her corporate employer, the tech-obsessed and sometimes militant open-source community, and the world of users, that Netscape asked her to run the Mozilla project. She might reasonably have passed on that opportunity, given that almost everyone expected Mozilla to fail. But Baker found the offer irresistible.

She recognized at once that Mozilla was a chance to help shape a new kind of organization that existed outside the bounds of corporate governance and of many of the ordinary rules of work. Most of the contributors would be volunteers, and the coin of the realm would be not salary or title, but respect, accomplishment, camaraderie, and challenge. It would not be an uncoordinated free-for-all; the community, for the most part, would need to agree on the direction the project would take and on who would be given responsibility for a task. Mozilla would be a meritocracy. If you proved talented and diligent, you'd get more important tasks and ultimately acquire some level of project leadership, sidestepping much of the politics and bias of traditional corporations.

It would be easy to assume that leadership is less important in this sort of community-driven organization. In fact, the opposite is true, says Sandeep Krishnamurthy, who is an associate professor in the business administration program at the University of Washington, Bothell, and has studied Mozilla. "Someone has to take the lead and reach out to this large group of people to provide feedback and motivate them," he says. In some ways, he adds, the bar at an open-source organization is higher for a manager, not lower. Unlike employees, volunteers generally won't put up with inept, bullying, or unfair managers. They'll just walk away. Edicts won't work when it comes to getting this sort of a community moving in a common direction. Rather, it takes a combination of inspiration and persuasion to build consensus.

If Baker proved an effective leader, it would be in spite of her not having the two most common characteristics of open-source movers and shakers: being a man and being a programming whiz. It's estimated that less than 2 percent of the open-source community is female. Meanwhile, the percentage of respected open-source leaders who didn't get to their positions via daring feats of coding is probably just as small. "Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's open door," says Krishnamurthy. "To get anywhere, you have to win the respect of an elite group of people who develop code." To do that entirely through nontechnical management skills would be nearly unprecedented, to do it as a woman all the more so.

But that was not the first challenge Baker faced. Soon after she took the helm of Mozilla, AOL (NYSE:TWX) agreed to buy Netscape for $4.2 billion, a deal completed in 1999. The work on Mozilla continued. But lacking a clear prospect of a fast return on its investment in Netscape, AOL started to clamp down on the project's costs, laying off Baker in 2001. But while AOL could cut off Baker's salary, Mozilla was an independent entity, and Baker, who had become a popular and respected figure in the open-source world, remained as an unpaid volunteer for about a year, until a nonprofit called the Open Source Applications Foundation offered to restore a portion of her former salary to support her Mozilla work.

In 2002, the Mozilla project released its first official product, Mozilla 1.0. It was a suite of Internet applications that integrated a Web browser with programs for e-mail, online chat, bulletin boards, and building websites. The program worked well, but by this time the world had largely accepted Internet Explorer, and there were other simple programs for e-mail and other tasks. Few computer users wanted to start all over with a new, relatively complex piece of software. Mozilla 1.0 was the solution to a problem that no one seemed to have.

That might have been the end of the story, but it turned out there was a small side project taking place within Mozilla that until then had received relatively little attention. Two young programmers, Blake Ross and David Hyatt, had been working on the browser portion of Mozilla 1.0, breaking it down and reassembling it in leaner form. They were like two guys in a minivan factory dragging parts off the assembly line to a dark corner of the building to assemble a dune buggy. The result was a simple, speedy browser. Now, in 2002, with Mozilla 1.0 failing to cause a stir, a question presented itself: Was it possible that while most of the team had been toiling away on a doomed Internet suite, Ross and Hyatt had quietly thrown together the basis of an IE killer?

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